BIG DARK HOLE: AND OTHER STORIES, Jeffrey Ford's latest story collection

BIG DARK HOLE: and Other Stories
JEFFREY FORD
Small Beer Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 LOCUS AWARD—BEST COLLECTION! Winners announced 25 June 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Jeffrey Ford story may start out in the innocuous and routine world of college teaching or evenings on a porch with your wife. But inevitably the weird comes crashing in. Maybe it’s an unexpected light in a dark and uninhabited house, maybe it’s a drainage tunnel that some poor kid is suddenly compelled to explore. Maybe there’s a monkey in the woods or an angel that you’ll need to fight if you want to gain tenure. Big Dark Hole is about those big, dark holes that we find ourselves once in a while and maybe, too, the big dark holes that exist inside of us.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA LIBRARYTHING'S EARLY REVIEWERS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Dudebro Jeffrey Ford voice on full Technicolor display...if you've never read Ford's stories, you're either going to hate the hell out of that voice from giddy-up to whoa, in which case give the collection a miss; or you're going to see the voice as its own contiunuing character, the kind-of career-long Rod Serling of the author's imaginitive universe. I liked the voice from my first encounter and if you don't, bail instantly.

These aren't Horror Stories, they're atmospheric tales of strange and uncongruent realities that look a lot like consensus reality. As is the statutory requirement for story-collection reviews, I will employ the Bryce Method of giving a line or two and a rating to each story individually.

The Thousand Eyes does a lot in a little space. It's Gary speaking, introducing his South Jersey homeplace with its various ongoing side characters:

Barney explained Merle's style as "Edward Hicks meets Edward Hopper in a bare-knuckle match."

High-class medium-octane unease-inducing weirdness set in a South Jersey dive (!) bar with a "Devil Went Down to Georgia" vibe...let's say 3.5 stars

Hibbler’s Minions introduces us to a carnival at large in the Dustbowl era from Janus the Two-Faced Man's point of view. Only his two faces are actually two separate-ish people in one body; and Ichbon, the Maestro, was a protégé of the great Barnum who's assembled a *true* carnival. The carnies are all truly unusual, not flimsy fakes; the people are genuinely interesting. But every Eden has an end, and this one....

Fleas, never my favorite critters, will feature in my nightmares for a long, long time. 4 stars

Monster Eight stopped exactly when it was getting good!!

"I do have an appointment to break a priest's leg this evening, so if we could pick up the pace, that would be fine," {the Monster} said.

You bloody tease, Jeffrey Ford! Promising me such excellent and earned violence then...*poof* 3.5 ragey stars

Inn of the Dreaming Dog uses the Satanic Second (Person) voice to remind us that one companion is worth fighting to keep; no one really understands your journey but you; and the guides are also the jailers in a simulated Paradise that makes no sense until you realize only Hell is real. 4 stars despite poking me in my chest for eleven pages.

Monkey in the Woods reminds us that Memory is a goddess for a reason: She's distant, pretty, and unapproachable; but dare to make yourself known to her, she will rip the veil off and show you the rotting nothingness of reality! Fun times. 3.5 stars

The Match twanged me like a guitar string (out-of-tune G#).

That night was a Friday, so we sat out on the porch and got hammered on wine. Me, red. Lynn, white. We played the little cylinder of a music box on Pandora's Nat King Cole station. It was spring and things were starting to blossom.

Saint Drogo, the bilocating patron saint of coffee? Metatron, the Recording Angel? Neither attested in any primary sources; each seemingly invented from whole cloth to suit the needs of the moment; this all happens in the dreams of a semi-soused old Composition teacher. Sheer, playful delight. 4.5 stars

From the Balcony of the Idawolf Arms does the improbable: Makes a struggling family the romantic heart of a monster movie without losing a single member. The struggling mom, the kids without supervision but working with her to keep the ship afloat...and the enigma of Mr. Susi, the reclusive landlord who just *might* be a li'l bit too fond of calamari... 4 stars

Sisyphus in Elysium endows the ancient myth of condign punishment with a physicality, an absoluteness that roots it in reality ina shocking way. It never fails...your work in Life isn't completable, but your work also isn't escapable. The idea of Sisyphus and his labors is always fresh and never, ever fresher than when it's told with Author Ford's cruelest and least self-forgiving rage. 5 stars


The Jeweled Wren takes us inside the haunted house, you know the one...there's never anything wrong with it, but it's just *wrong* in some indefinable way...the one where no one ever seems to make any noise but you could swear you heard something. There! Didn't you hear that?

"At every corner of the basement," said Hester, "there's a plate with a rotting horse chestnut on it. Could be some ghost nonsense."

"It's to keep spiders out of the house," said Gary.

"How do you know that?" she asked.

"Some guy told me when I was over walking in the preserve. There are a couple of those trees and they'd dropped these weird green globes. I asked the guy what they were and he told me all about them and the thing about the spiders. I asked him if the spider thing really worked. He said, 'Good as anything.'"

He plays with us, does Author Ford. He sets this little thought-bomb off...what could horse chestnuts have to do with this story, no one spends that much time talking about something that doesn't pay off...and Tasers us with a twist that only makes sense if you assume that the meaning isn't the story, but the story is about meaning. 4.5 stars

Not Without Mercy Cosmic version of The Ring. Oh...Uncle Gribnob...please, please take me first. 4 stars

The Bookcase Expedition brings Lynn and Gary back to us, and remember Barney from "The Thousand Eyes"? He's got a cameo, of sorts. She's got her ways, does Lynn, and Gary's just not swift enough to catch her as she uses them. I think Sopso is the real hero of the piece, though... 3.5 stars

The Winter Wraith truly made me glad I can't have a Yule tree anymore..."A distant cousin, once accused of pyromania, arriving for an indefinite visit," sounds awful doesn't it. But just you wait.... 3.5 stars

Big Dark Hole really doesn't do one damn thing for me. Stand by Me, sort of? Only with a Ben vibe...? Anyway. Not the best example of a Ford story. 3 stars

Thanksgiving brings "Uncle Jake" to the table...the one old guy no one really remembers, the irritating eternal there-ness that truthfully masks the absent ones from all tables. Unwanted, unneeded, undeserving...all the usual things spare people get thought about them. But what if, this once, there's more to "Uncle Jake" than you thought? Fuck around and find out.... 4 stars

Five-Pointed Spell brings Lynn and Gary back, Mr. Ford this time, as they abandon South Jersey for the fleshpots of Ohio where Lynn can have her dream job. They buy their old Ohio farmhouse. It comes with serious baggage, strange doins...it all comes with ghosts. What doesn't, we're in a Ford story!

He's, well, he's a Long Islander and would like to get a little oceany now and then, so takes a chance to read in New York City...that goes to scarytown, of course. Ghosts from his past, but really really strange paths to finding the facts about my old school pal Toby. Thank goodness for Barney! (Remember him? This is one of the charms of reading Jeffrey Ford's stories...they all end up in a cosmic-weird do loop.) I'll give this one 4.5 stars

SCHOOL BOARD, prescient debut political satire from 2014

SCHOOL BOARD
MIKE FREEDMAN
Broken Levee Books
$14.99 Kindle, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Houston, Texas, 1999. Enter Tucker "Catfish" Davis, a high school senior with high-flying political ambitions as the self-proclaimed heir to populist Louisiana Governors Huey and Earl Long. Armed with idealism and a fedora, he embarks on a quixotic campaign to get elected to the local school board in an effort to help the "little people" of Houston.

In the wild days that follow, Catfish's long-shot bid gains traction through guerilla campaigning against a questionable tax deal supported by his opponent, a powerful executive at an Enron-esque energy company. With the help of his classmates, an indicted Louisiana governor, a gay journalist with nascent mayoral ambitions and an ex-Green Beret trained to wage unconventional warfare, Catfish makes it a race Houston will never forget.

Based on an actual 1999 news story, School Board is an entertaining but satirical debut novel that revels in the diversity, madness and absurdities of the Bayou City.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

"I'm not wearing this."
"You are if you want to win tonight's debate," the political consultant said, holding up the picture of Walker in full polo regalia in the Chronicle that Tucker's campaign had planted in the morning edition. "Less polo playing, more goat roping."
"We live in Memorial, the richest area of town."
The political consultant showed a poll from The Pony Express with Walker trailing by twelve percent.
"That's Tucker's paper," Walker said. "What legitimate poll has a margin of error of eleven percent?"

This is a sassy, Swiftian satire of turn-of-the-century Houston, Texas, and its far-too-rich, far-too-crazy political culture. The place that gave rise to both the Bushes that infested the White House. The culture that's given rise to many, many a ridiculous fad...moving their baseball team to the American League! building freeways not trams! nary a zoning law to be found!...is skilfully flensed by a native son who saw this plot play out in real life.

What makes books like this fun to read is the sense of absurdity and the fun they allow you to have laughing at, as well as with, the protagonist. The thing that keeps me reading in political satires is that sense of being outside the action looking at them make the stupid mistake or misread the room, a lot like y'all who watch The Office and Arrested Development do.

What didn't work for me, this time, was the sense that I, the one laughing at other people, wasn't laughing as hard or with as much contempt as the author was. He seems to have a really serious dislike for these characters. It's not like that's unheard of, of course, but it doesn't make me feel comfortable...I need to sense the author pulling his punches or I start sympathizing with the targets not the actors.

I won't shove it at you...but I won't say avoid it, either. In today's political climate, maybe this is just the thing for working through your emotional breakdown as the spectacle of Clinton versus Trump (!!) unfolds.

"Food" for Thought...and Possibly Bulimia

ANYTHING THAT MOVES: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture
DANA GOODYEAR
Riverhead Books
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A new American cuisine is forming. Animals never before considered or long since forgotten are emerging as delicacies. Parts that used to be for scrap are centerpieces. Ash and hay are fashionable ingredients, and you pay handsomely to breathe flavored air. Going out to a nice dinner now often precipitates a confrontation with a fundamental question: Is that food?

Dana Goodyear’s anticipated debut, Anything That Moves, is simultaneously a humorous adventure, a behind-the-scenes look at, and an attempt to understand the implications of the way we eat. This is a universe populated by insect-eaters and blood drinkers, avant-garde chefs who make food out of roadside leaves and wood, and others who serve endangered species and Schedule I drugs—a cast of characters, in other words, who flirt with danger, taboo, and disgust in pursuit of the sublime. Behind them is an intricate network of scavengers, dealers, and pitchmen responsible for introducing the rare and exotic into the marketplace. This is the fringe of the modern American meal, but to judge from history, it will not be long before it reaches the family table.

Anything That Moves is a highly entertaining, revelatory look into the raucous, strange, fascinatingly complex world of contemporary American food culture, and the places where the extreme is bleeding into the mainstream.

My Review: I will try almost anything once. Almost anything, stuff like eyeballs and mountain oysters and (unknowingly) dog. Mountain oysters are tasty, eyeballs are gross, and I vomited for an hour after being told the greasy, slick, icky meat was dog.

There is stuff that these damnfool eejits are *paying*money*for* that there is not a single, solitary, remote, fat, or slim chance that I would consent to sit at a table with, still less eat.

Actually, I could stop there and the review would be complete. But there's a bit more I'd like to say. Dana Goodyear writes for The New Yorker, and it shows. Her phrases are often quite euphonious, but in the end more snacklike than mealtimey:

Appetites are hard to legislate, and people usually end up doing what they want to do. The year {Upton} Sinclair wrote The Jungle, he got his first summer cold. It was the beginning of the score of ailments that led him to John Henry Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium (sic), which promoted vegetarianism, and to the writings of Horace Fletcher, "The Great Masticator," who prescribed chewing your food extra-thoroughly.

I stopped subscribing to The New Yorker for that reason. Okay, back in the Shawn era we had them memorable 10,000 words on zinc, its extraction, refinement, and many uses. But now we have ephemeral, mildly interesting stuff like...

...like...

...and there you have it. The chapters in this book could have been entitled "Notes from LA" and I would've skipped gaily past them, being largely uninterested in when not actively hostile to LA. And I would've been not one smidgin less well-rounded a person.

Goodyear's entertaining moments describing the feuds and rivalres among these freaky-deaky foodies are pleasant enough. Her description of eating some of the offal these folks consume made me mildly queasy, and never...not once...made me curious enough to try some of the disgusting crap the effete of palate and overloaded of wallet gourmands herein profiled savored.

I received this copy from the publisher via LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. That made this review possible for me to write without resorting to invective, vituperation, and contumely. Had I spent $27.95 on it, I''d be so moltenly angry even yet that it would be unwise to approach me without something normal and wholesome like a double cheesburger with bacon, mayo, and onions plus an extra-large fries prominently displayed as a token of goodwill.

Make that burger a triple.


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LESTER HIGATA'S 20TH CENTURY, love and death and family...spelunked and excavated for you to appreciate

LESTER HIGATA'S 20TH CENTURY
BARBARA HAMBY
University of Iowa Press
$16.00 trade paper or ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: “Lester Higata knew his life was about to end when he walked out on the lanai behind his house in Makiki and saw his long-dead father sitting in a lawn chair near the little greenhouse where Lester kept his orchids.” Thus begins Barbara Hamby’s magical narrative of the life of a Japanese American man in Honolulu. The quietly beautiful linked stories in Lester Higata’s 20th Century bring us close to people who could be, and should be, our friends and neighbors and families.

Starting in 1999 with his conversation with his father, continuing backward in time throughout his life with his wife, Katherine, and their children in Hawai‘i, and ending with his days in the hospital in 1946, as he heals from a wartime wound and meets the woman he will marry, Hamby recreates not just one but any number of the worlds that have shaped Lester. The world of his mother, as stubbornly faithful to Japan and Buddhism as Katherine’s mother is to Ohio and conservative Christianity; the world of his children, whose childhoods and adulthoods are vastly different from his own; the world after Pearl Harbor and Vietnam; the world of a professional engineer and family man: the worlds of Lester Higata’s 20th Century are filled with ordinary people living extraordinary lives, moving from farms to classrooms and offices, from racism to acceptance and even love, all in a setting so paradisal it should be heaven on earth.

Never forgetting the terrors of wartime—“We wake one morning with the wind racing toward us like an animal, and nothing is ever the same”—but focusing on the serene joys of peacetime, Lester populates his worlds with work, faith, and family among the palm trees and blue skies of the island he loves.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA LIBRARYTHING'S EARLY READERS PROGRAM. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not every author has the fortitude to start a collection of stories with a story about the death of the title character. Hamby is to be applauded for this, it's gutsy! It isn't extremely successful, though, beacuse the unspooling of Lester Higata's life from 1946 to 1999 is unevenly presented and unevenly edited, as quite some several of these stories appeared in other venues before being collected here.

The very best story, the chef d'ouevre, is the delightful, fresh, energetic story of Lester's last day: "Lester Higata's String Theory Paradise." Waking up to a conversation with your dead father, one in which he bashes your equally dead Gorgon of a mother, is a pretty good clue that the rest of the day isn't going to be normal. And it is, oddly, very normal in its events and yet Lester's certainty that this is his last day on Earth manages to make all its events sharp and clear and dear to him. It's an excellent story. It's no surprise to me that this story appeared in TriQuarterly and was edited by the superb, talented, and very accomplished Susan Hahn. She impressed me mightily in our one professional contact, when she bought a story from one of my then-clients in my former life as an agent.

Well, I said the collection was uneven...and the next story, "Iniki Chicken", is proof of this. In and of itself, it's not a bad little piece, but it needed a pruning before being put in the show. It appeared in Southwestern Review, which magazine has a decent reputation, but the piece has an overwordy quality that detracts from Hamby's clean and simple message: "Looking at all the people gathered around the table, I wondered how so many different faces could be made in the image of one God? Maybe the Hawaiians were right, and there were many gods: {there follows a list of four gods and their areas of expertise, taking up a long paragraph}...But if there was only one God what could he possibly be like?..." A taut meditation on the nature of spiritual belief and its relationship to human interaction becomes a comparative religion lecture, and loses force and clarity. SO frustrating!

The strong stories outnumber the weak ones, fortunately: "Mr. Manago's Mango Trees" is bleak, but wryly witty; "Lani Dances the Zombie Hula in LA" is a spare, cold-eyed flensing of the way promise gets transmogrified into failure and misery; "Sayonara, Mrs. Higata" pitilessly shows the too-late-ness of deathbed regrets, and the hollow-yet-shining face of Duty's Daughters; and "Lester Higata in Love" is heartbreakingly tender and beautifully rendered, its landscape of love's losses and joys as mountainous as O'ahu itself.

The University of Iowa press sent this ARC to me as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. It's a pleasure to be able to recommend the collection to any reader even slightly interested in the geography of love.